Tuesday, December 11, 2012

San Diego's most famous Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza recently resigned as head of King's College. The trigger for his doing so was that he showed up at a Christian convention, introducing a woman as his fiancee, when neither he nor the woman were divorced from their respective spouses.

Yes, people get divorced and people make mistakes; there's no stone to be thrown about that. But the issue here is that not only is this a man who earns his living defending the Bible as the revealed word of God and as a guide for how to live our lives, but he doesn't even have the decency to show any humility. Instead we get him arguing that, on a technicality, he's not doing anything wrong:

"I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles." He later helpfully clarifies this: "What I meant was that I didn't know what rule of Christian morality it violates...[I am not] violating one of the Ten Commandments. Imprudent is not the same as wrong."

I hope we all remember this the next time he's arguing against (for example) gay marriage, or anything else that's not in the Ten Commandments. D'Souza is reinforcing the conclusion many of us have been forced to, that Christians often (usually?) behave as if their morality is about what they personally want in the moment, rather than any sort of actual principles.